Customer Reviews

Optimal Control: Linear Quadratic Methods (Dover Books on Engineering)

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I tried to use this book as a newcomer to the optimal control two years ago. I was reading it patiently and I even tried to add some infromation from the internet. But the book is very difficult to understand. Many steps in deriving new formulas are unclear and left unexplained.

I really do not recommend it as a student's book. Now I am more familiar with optimal control theory, but I still cannot find this book useful. It might be useful as refrence, but I doubt it.

It is a classic book on advanced LQR control and has been cited extensively. But it is not easy to read and not appropriate for self-learning. In addition, many symbols and notations are out of fashion. For example, the state-space representation of a linear system in this book is dx/dt=Fx+Gu instead of dx/dt=Ax+Bu. The matrix transpose is denoted as A' instead of A^T. The book is published in 1990. I hope it can be revised so as to attract more readers.

By the way, I recently found a very good math book on advanced LQR named "Linear systems and control" by MJ Corless. It provides many useful proofs on basic LQR related problems.

It is a great reference book; though I believe you could learn the subject matter from the book, I can't speak for it. I am currently a Phd Student in Astrodynamics focusing on formation flying and I have had a grad. level course on LQR/LQE, following that it is an excellent reference text if you need to look something up.